Java is one of the most popular programming languages, used by over seven million developers to create everything from enterprise applications to complex robots. Over the past several years we’ve seen an evolution in the Java ecosystem, with the accelerated growth of open-source tools and frameworks like Spring. Microservice architectures are becoming more prevalent, and developers are building more applications on cloud platforms using containers and managed services. The Java ecosystem is complex and running Java applications in the cloud at an enterprise scale can be challenging. Our customers are asking us to help them modernize their Java applications and run them on an enterprise-grade platform—Azure.
We’ve made substantial investments in Java to support a wide range of customer workloads, from the development of Azure Spring Cloud with VMware as a managed destination for Spring Boot applications to the acquisition of jClarity, and the creation of our Microsoft Java Engineering Group. The Microsoft Build of OpenJDK provides a new supported Java runtime option on Azure with the potential for Azure-tuned optimizations—now generally available. We now support the full range of Java EE and Jakarta EE application servers through collaborations with Red Hat, Oracle, and IBM, with newly released offers for Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) and IBM WebSphere on Azure Virtual Machines.
Microsoft is also using Java extensively. We see Java as critical to our success as a company, and it helps power some of our most strategic products like LinkedIn, SQL Server, Azure, Minecraft, and Yammer. We’re running hundreds of thousands of Java virtual machines (JVMs) in production for our internal systems (not including any customer workloads), and LinkedIn alone has thousands of Java microservices in production. Microsoft brings the expertise of running enterprise Java workloads, both internally and externally, to help our customers transform their business.
“I talk about our move to the cloud like this—imagine if you’re pulling into a racetrack pitstop and instead of changing the tires, you had to change out the whole engine. And in making the switch to Microsoft Azure, we changed out that engine—literally—overnight.”—Doug Wilson, Senior Director of Software Engineering, Kroger
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